This Week They Said

This stupid, fat guy with the red outfit [ has been] taking over our television ads and we say it's enough

This stupid, fat guy with the red outfit [ has been] taking over our television ads and we say it's enough. Martin Carvat, a member of the Czech republic's Creative Copywriters Club, which is campaigning to eliminate the "Americanised" Santa Claus from the nation's airwaves.

For 40 years, we talked to the Soviet Union, during a time when they were committed to wiping us off the face of the earth. So you talk to your enemy.

The US must enter dialogue with Iraq's neighbours, including Iran, says James Baker, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group.

Baker-Hamilton is a really important part of our considerations. But we want to make sure the military gets their point of view in. After all, a lot of what we're doing is a military operation.

READ MORE

A less than effusive President Bush responds to the study group's findings.

We will never recognise the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, says his Hamas-led government will never recognise Israel.

I think that to be told that the Presbyterians of Northern Ireland were all lined up to undermine the proper democratic government and to break the British link is, of course, nonsense, absolute nonsense, and a perversion of history.

DUP leader the Rev Ian Paisley, after Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams outlines the role of Presbyterians in the nationalist and republican struggles.

Now there will be no wedding day, no 21st birthday, no graduation and no grandchildren.

Sheola Keaney's father Peter. Her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Kennedy, was convicted of her murder this week.

It causes social problems with the 14, 15 and 16-year-old drinker. It's drunk in parks and on beaches - it's almost driving them wild.

Galway councillor Michael Crowe calls for added tax on Buckfast, a cheap and potent fortified wine said to be popular with underage drinkers.

It is a deliberate exaggeration, of course, to say that France is a schizophrenic, paranoid and hypochondriac nation but it is an exaggeration which tries to make an important point. By not facing up to realities, we are in danger of turning France's many advantages into handicaps.

The respected Paris sociologist Gerard Mermet says the French nation has esteem issues.

I was pale, unconscious. It appeared as though I was dying.

Former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar speaks for the first time about his collapse in Ireland recently. Mr Gaidar believes he was poisoned.

It literally was the Wizard of Oz. It was just sucking things up into it. There were tiles. There were bits of wood. There were trees.

" Amanda", a London shopkeeper, who witnessed a tornado hit a suburb in the northwest of the city.

The man was demented with fear.

Michael Varley, neighbour of farmer Pádraig Nally, on trial for the manslaughter of a Traveller, says Mr Nally lived in constant fear of attacks on his property.